They want AI? Give a model your old computer and have it do your work from A to Z. It’ll free you to do what you want. Salary probably already covers the model’s plan.

How would management know if you're using AI or not, and what you're using it for, other than the cost?

I have found most bosses to be pretty damn dense, mostly interested in making sparkling reports to THEIR boss. In fact, I rated them by how fast they stole my ideas. The ideas weren't so brilliant, so I was glad to let go of them, as long as they got a life somehow.

The sharpest bosses (rare) would steal them with a week. One took about 6 years, and got them wrong. A couple of us were and are real open source junkies and argued that instead of screen-scraping various Learning Management Systems, (LMS) all of which had proprietary databases to lock school systems into their software with no possibility of export, that we give away a database schema for all schools use open source, and sell the software around it in a competitive marketplace.

It's called giving customers choice. Nahhhhhhhhhh.

He later scrawled a big brainstorm map on a board, mentioning the open source LMS, Sakai [0] Showing his deep understanding of open source, he spelled it "Sockeye".

I read tech magazines and one issue of "Fast Company" (2005) was on my desktop. When the boss entered the office for who knows what, he couldn't get his eyes off the magazine cover. It was a picture of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons with a feature article "Is Your Boss a Psychopath?" [1] I would have gotten the magazine without it, but (surprise) he aced the quiz inside.

I'm not making this up. [2] Image hosted at x02.me

Conclusion: Try to outsmart management. It's easy. I did it many times. I'll share some later on.

Cheers.

[0] https://www.sakailms.org

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050709032131/http://www.fastco...

[2] https://x02.me/i/sCWcAj.jpg

Claude team and Enterprise memberships allow the primary account holder to see your Claude usage statistics.

> How would management know if you're using AI

Enterprise accounts have admin panels to see token spend/usage/set company wide guardrails and system prompts.

it is all over not just us

I’ve never felt dumber, at least googling back in the day was a skill

dude can you believe this crap? i’ve been hand-writing manuscripts this whole time and now my boss wants me to… use a printing press?! like what the hell????

me and the other monks aren’t gonna do this crap, we’ve been doing it our way forever and there’s NO WAY those things can do it as good as i can

>use a printing press?

Only that this particular "printing press" could randomly include typos and even complete non-sense, that every page should be proof read separately....

and a drunk monk would not make those mistakes?

A monk would at least know when they are drunk...

agree on that. stay safe out there

Yes, printing presses were still human in the loop :)

Well, why wouldn't you use it, not for coding, but for reviews and research?

Just a case of management not knowing the history of tech ROI or current studies on AI project ROI such as the one from MIT. Thinking off the top of my head... I could see AI filling some of the administrative roles of Surgical Team teams mentioned the classic book, "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks.

On a positive note: The AIs make great super search and within certain domains are effective. On a negative note: Often when I see AI used by others, I wonder if these people have heard of code libraries. :)

A lot of what is going on is FOMO...

AI Serenity Prayer "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot use AI on, Courage to use AI on the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference."

They’re correct, albeit likely misinformed in their decision making.

Industry is changing. You either have to adapt to keep with the times or find a tech job where AI isn’t necessary - which practically speaking will become a rarity over time.

But the thing is that nobody has actually proven or provided concrete, peer-reviewed evidence that AI actually results in higher revenue, growth, and profits to businesses. Everyone is just imagining or assuming this.

For example, at my day job, they pushed it on us, but speed of coding and technical work was not the thing that was bottlenecking productivity. Until someone gets 2 businesses in the same market doing more or less the same thing, one which does it without any AI coding, and another which uses almost exclusively AI coding, and demonstrates that the one that uses AI almost exclusively A) Has more reach B) Makes more money C) produces better quality products and D) Can actually sustain that over a long period of time, nobody has any business forcing this and claiming that "its inevitable" or "we have to use this" etc...

But that's not what's happening. These seemingly otherwise somewhat bright, so-called scientific people are not using any science at all in their conclusions and statements. Science teaches us to question, to not take something for gospel, to develop hypotheses, to test these hypotheses, to challenge. It doesn't teach us to go "Oh well, this is inevitable, let's just throw in the towel." To that end, I'm see multiple entrepreneurs and founders who feel the same way start making a difference here by starting their own businesses using ethics and scientific/engineering principles to approach it, which excites me. I don't mind leaving big tech, big moneybags behind. We should have never worshipped them in the first place.

The inverse is also true. No one has actually proven or provided that writing code by hand actually results in higher revenue….it’s just the way things always were.

I can personally tell you that AI has indeed increased revenue and growth and I see it every day, both in and out of my day job.

To each their own I suppose.

I'm not saying it's not useful or what won't be the end result, but people sure love to jump to conclusions on this one. From the day ChatGPT came out, everyonen been telling doomsday stories... Also note that there's also room for innovation still. LLMs don't really innovate, they regurgitate. Having no human coders anymore will mean that we will never advance our algorithms and methods beyond where they already are.

It started at the end of 2025, nothing new to me. Either adapt to it, work more on finding interesting features and use cases, and introduce them. Don't be a coder; be an engineer OR/ leave; It's a hard decision :)!

Modern commercial airline pilots manually fly less than 10 percent of a typical flight, using automated systems for the vast majority of the journey.

They don't get into the cockpit until they can do 100% properly.

I understand and I agree with the side effects of too much AI use but this is inevitable. I think it's better to balance, use AI for work and at the same time, keep learning, maintain habit of writing logic to protect your brain.

lol found the self-proclaimed 10x engineer

lmfao

Lean into it. Automate your code reviews. Automate ticket refinement. Automatically draft PRs with a demo video of every acceptance criteria. Automate status updates to Slack.

Using AI doesn't mean you're making yourself dumber. It comes down to how you use it.

That is not true see lighter

It’s sad, but there’s no getting around it. Besides, I don’t think using AI in itself makes you less intelligent.

This is happening at several (typically big tech) companies. Not all companies and orgs are doing this, however. I'm very firm when I say that any type of "forced AI" usage is a huge mistake and it's also a slap in the face to the employees whom were presumably hired for their skill and talent and should be trusted to make such tool decisions, especially engineering and technical teams, to not trust their judgement on when AI should and should not be used. This is the first time in my career where I've seen leaders who are too high to understand what their folks in the trenches are doing, try to force them to use a tool. The architects and building engineers have a very interesting job, but telling the construction workers which hammer or heavy equipment to use is not and should not be one of them, for a reason. In my experience, engineers will use AI when they need to use AI, but at a handful of companies, AI is being pushed as a solution to problems where it doesn't even make sense, then the companies are backpedaling afterwards because their token costs are through the roof... So they get their employees hooked on using as much AI as possible, then have to come back and say "actually, we need to cap you at $XXX per month." So all of the AI automation that was developed with no limit now can hardly operate effectively and needs to be re-designed... It's completely absurd.

Start looking for a different job, or better yet, build your own business.

How will they know if you're using AI or not?

I would say as a developer you absolutely need to be comfortable using the tools and understanding the possibilities but how much you use it should be up to you within any token / licensing limits.

I remember back in the 90s when people were starting to use IDEs and other developers would use vi or emacs for everything. There was always a suspicion that each camp wasn't doing it properly! Management didn't care as long as the work got done.

Companies will have a breakdown of token/credit spend by user for team subscriptions, so they could know that way.

Umm, isn't usage very easy to automate? You can just use AI to orchestrate the creation of questions and answer them (including generate crap) in a loop? Of course you'd have to be a bit clever to have it appear like a human is driving it which isn't hard. So, use AI to fight AI?

They might be able to hide it for a while but in a few months/weeks, it will tell itself or break down. The speed at which an “AI powered” engineer can deliver is not within regular human capacity.

Company pays for enterprise tools (say claude code) that track who is using it and how much

Use AI for documentation and other stuffs that can still pump up your AI usage if you are not comfortable using AI for coding. Or use it for coding and modify afterwards. It still counts.

Depends on how you use it. Look for use cases where it can reduce work. For instance let's say you usually have poor requirements. You can build a tool to help users properly flesh out their wants. I built a prototype for fun (https://daid-sandy.vercel.app) for stuff like that. Could use it to create documentation templates and let it do the heavy lifting Could also use it as a code critic. You build out a design for an integration or new app and then you can let the AI tool murder board it.

there are plenty of different ways to take this. You can use it as a supplement without making yourself dumber. Take the parts of your job you hate doing and inject a little AI into the workflow.

same memo here. i use it for boring boilerplate. still rewrite the auth bits myself.